Saturday, 16 April 2011

Nor breadth of this nation has yet been measured, nor its depths plumbed

Tulane Avenue Doughboy: homeless man sleeping on park bench beneath World War I soldier monument, Tulane Avenue, New Orleans: photo by Infrogmation, 8 December 2010The past -- we would not find rest, beneath its burden

Skid row, Los Angeles: photo by Jorobeq, 3 September 2006 Mabel, 2009The present -- we would turn aside, and it would all come down

"Nickelsville" homeless encampment (named after Seattle mayor Greg Nickels), toward the end of its three-month stay in the parking lot of University Congregational United Church, University District, Seattle: photo by Joe Mabel, 2009From the sky fell the wealth of the nations -- To every monad a blue plastic pod of its own

Shanty town, Manila, beside Manila City Jail (seen from Recto LRT Station): photo by Mile Gonzalez, 20 May 2007The generality of the nations -- many not yet wired in, many more forever hung out to dry

And then -- a change, as in the quality of the light just after sunrise

Sun sets over the old medina in central Tripoli: photo by Patrick André Perron, 2007

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our [faces] from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

But he [was] wounded for our transgressions, [he was] bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace [was] upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

8 comments:

Denoting the many formal beauties of this seems to miss the point of this powerful piece, but they have and will not go unnoticed. I'm just letting the whole thing sink in. Not being any sort of student of scripture, though, I was surprised after reading the line "And we hid as it were our faces from them" (two or three times; it's fascinating) to learn its derivation and find how seamlessly it fits in with the rest of the piece. That's really something.

Alas there are days in the life (well, also long, distracted, aimlessly meditative nights) when the miraculous ability to perform one simple, helpful, useful, practical act seems farther out of reach than walking on water (said the heel to the healer).

Today was one of those increasingly familiar days here when the sound of house demolition becomes, by what must be an eerie form of synesthesia, a sound-picture evocation of that emergent architecture of the future in which the disposable modular otherness of the monad catches out of the anxious corner of its leaking eye faint unwanted glimpses of its own redundant mendicant practicum.

Home-care and homelessness will converge in the emergent architecture of the future, among the weeds and the broken car parts and junked air conditioners.

And as all this d/evolves, every blessed second, every cursed minute, every wasted hour, every lost night and day, by the medieval gate in Japan, while the rain falls, the humiliated samurai stumble around in the mud, trying to find their broken swords.

It's the fleeting glint in the muck that twinkles like a little star.

Full moon out there beyond the migraine night.

Meanwhile, Elmo, let's go for a ride with Thomas Merton and a Purple Swamphen on an empty boat.

Common, all too common. For many years we have in fact been huddled under successive patchwork layers of those blue plastic pods. But of course each individual blue plastic pod, like each child of the gods, has a limited life expectancy of its own. They come, they go. Currently the latest generation of pods is draped over the caved-in front steps of the collapsing mansion. All that remains between the children of the gods and the heavens, I am sometimes tempted to think, is blue plastic.